The Spirit of ’76: Pope John Paul II’s Ford Escort (and Some Stuff about Ireland)

While the rest of the U.S.-based C/D crew celebrated the Fourth by washing themselves in the triple Holy Waters of Lakes Michigan, Huron, and Schlitz, I found myself spending Independence Day ensconced on the shores of Carlingford Lough, nestled roughly halfway between Belfast and Dublin on the east coast of Ireland. If my American automotive childhood was initially informed by full-size ’60s Pontiacs, B-body Mopar muscle, and Porsche 356s and 914s, my formative years over here were punctuated by W114 and W115 Benzes, 300-series Volvos, and rear-drive Ford Escorts.

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In the summer of 1979, before I’d even visited nearby San Francisco, my folks bundled me up and whisked me off to my mother’s native island of Ireland. She’d arrived in California as a young nun, spent more than a decade as a teacher and administrator, and fell in love with a priest who’d originally gone to school to be a doctor. They remained married until their deaths in 2016. Which is to say that the Catholic thing is probably a fairly large part of this whole story as well.

She came from a family of six, the only girl. In one way or another, all of the siblings were remarkable, sort of TheRoyal Tenenbaums crossed with Angela’s Ashes, perhaps. Peter, the kid born just prior to my mother, scraped up enough Irish punts to buy a plot of land in the hills south of Dublin, used his skills as a draftsman to design a house, and then went and built the thing himself, with friends and family pitching in as time and skills allowed. In the 1970s and early ’80s, he was an Escort man, a modest, self-made European with a Francophile wife and four sons, and as a single-car household, they’d all wedge themselves into Ford’s rear-drive compact. My cousin Pierre, the youngest, noted: “We took one big family vacation, to Paris. The six of us in that Escort. It was the only time we ever did that.”

The car had been introduced in Europe in 1968, 11 years after the Sisters of Saint Louis had shipped my mom across the Atlantic to serve in Southern California. The Escort, especially in the British Isles, was a sales winner from the start. I remember one rainy day during that ’79 trip, in Tollymore Forest Park, where Game of Thrones would film years later, my mother ran back to Pete’s car to grab something and broke the key off in the door. It turns out she’d been trying to unlock the wrong red Escort. Pete somehow got his car unlocked and started, and we absconded back to my grandmother’s place, leaving some poor schnook to wonder who’d busted off a key in his car’s lock. Escorts were cheap, kinda cheerful, utilitarian, and they were made by Ford, a marque with a long history in the Emerald Isle. Ford opened a factory here early in the company’s history and maintained it for nearly 70 years. And in fact, FoMoCo’s Irish subsidiary still operates as Henry Ford & Son Ltd. It’s the only branch of the Blue Oval tree allowed the honor.

If what was good for General Motors was good for America, what was good for Henry Ford was funneled into the land of his ancestors. And the land of his ancestors has historically been overwhelmingly Catholic. A couple of months after I returned home from that first trip to Ireland in 1979, Pope John Paul II made the first papal visit to the country. At Dublin’s Phoenix Park, the new pope ministered to an estimated 1,250,000 people, nearly a third of the island’s population. It was pretty much the biggest thing to happen since the Battle of the Boyne.

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Later this summer, Pope Francis is dropping by. As of today, 480,000 of the 500,000 free tickets to his Phoenix Park mass have been snatched up. Ireland is a more secular, prosperous place these days. Instead of crippling poverty and sectarian violence, the country is grappling with the looming specter of Brexit and its effect on the border, as well as problems familiar to Americans, including income inequality and soaring housing prices in Dublin. It’s a broader, more internationally minded place than I’d ever considered it might become, but the accents are still reassuringly regional. From my perch here in Carlingford, I can look across the water (and the Irish border) to County Down, where they speak with a different lilt than the folks here in Louth. But the tickets to see Francis have moved briskly, with some of the pilgrims reportedly hailing from other countries.

This fall, the Polish pontiff’s 1976 Ford Escort heads to auction. Bearing the same hardy mechanicals as the first-generation cars, the Mark 2s got a bit of a styling update. The example driven by the former Karol Józef Wojtyła seems to be a decently preserved driver, with some dings and waves in the trim. It is, perhaps, the only Ford Escort with stewardship that can be traced to a pope and a saint. As a reflection of that, RM Auctions suggests that the remarkably pedestrian car could go for up to $300,000 at their Labor Day weekend event in Auburn, Indiana. If you’re interested, you might wanna start taking up a collection now.

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“The Spirit of ’76” is C/D’s Fourth of July holiday series highlighting some of the most awesome cars for sale from our nation’s bicentennial year.